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Wondering if anyone is finding more and more no follows actually being counted as links. How exactly do you mean "counted as"? Are you using a specific tool? If you are referring to an onpage link analysis, then all links are counted by design, regardless or whether they are marked nofollow or not.

I have tried this as well, but they either forget about it or do not want to use it. Not sure why, but I do know that they are busy, so it may just be that they are trying to complete their tasks as quickly as possible and don't want it to get in the way.

Matt Cutts explains how the site command works in this youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qigo05nAqKw&feature=player_embedded#!

thank you very much....

There are two quick methods I use to check if a site's ranking has been devalued or penalised; Compare the Page rank of the site in question with MozRank. If MozRank is 1.5+ points different, then the site may have been penalised by google and lost some of it's PR. Pick a sentence from the site of 5-6 words and search for this sentence in google enclosed in quotes. If you find the the site is ranking on the first page, then it probably hasn't been penalised or devalued heavily. I also use gut instinct for a lot of links and usually that's good measure - If a site look spammy, then it probably will to google. As for nolo.com, it looks like a pretty decent site to me, so I would be surprised if it's links have been devalued.

Thanks for fast and accurate response! Appreciate it!

I have had the exact opposite...I rank higher in google than Bing/yahoo... infact i created a dummy site with low quality links seattle-housepainting.com    and it ranks in Yahoo and is not on the map for google. I am still trying to make heads and tails of the diff.

You can change the setting in your google preferences if desired.

Far as I can tell, you will loose the Likes. This bug report has more info:  http://bugs.developers.facebook.net/show_bug.cgi?id=18198 From what I gather, if you leave the old URL in the button, it will continue to show the old count on the new page, but if someone Likes the new page it will count for the new page and not increment the old counter... I could be wrong, but that says to me that they are treating them as two separate pages, each with its own stats. I'm not sure how Google handles this, but if I had to guess, I would guess they are in the same boat. Someone else here may have more info on that though Brian

I have seen changes like this where it appears that a competitor has been spurred by being pushed out of the number 1 or 2 spot to take a look at their optimization for that particular term. Something else that could possibly affect just one keyword is the mix of anchor text in your link profile. There is some great discussion of this in the latest Whiteboard Friday - [Beyond Exact Match Anchor Text to Next Generation Link Signals.](Beyond Exact Match Anchor Text To Next Generation Link Signals - Whiteboard Friday "Beyond Exact Match Anchor Text") It might be worth taking a look at your link profile to see if there is any obvious difference in the mix of terms for the keyword that has changed. Hope that helps, Sha

The difference between positions 2 and 8 appear to be combined Organic/Google Places results. Perhaps for stability you should work on your Google Places listing. Google will combine the organic and places results if they see good optimisation of both. There's a good article on that here - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-research-local-citations-after-google-removed-them-from-places

I've seen some other South African sites like this that have ranked really well. In fact our brand name is a big term is South Africa, hence the reason I noticed the odd .za site appearing in the rankings. I'm not sure if the algorithm is different for the area and that's why it works?? To be completely honest with you, what you competitor has done may not be sustainable in the long term, but you can see he's got some easy links from 'high ranking pages'. I won't endorse it and sooner or later he may get a penalty, but he does seem to have found some easy wins for the moment at least!!

Hi Greg thanks for your reply I wondering what you usually offer your competitor to get your links? because i think they wouldn't want to link back to us because we are their competitor THanks again Jean

Make sure instant search is off though. I think the URLs mess up if that's on. I don't use instant much though, I hate it